Offshore Outsourcing & Scammer

For this we need to know first why companies like to outsource to offshore call center.

The answer is very simple. They like to maximize their earnings.  The average income in the high wage countries for telemarketer is around $20 per hour (Source: indeed.com from February 2015). Depending on the country are here additional expenses for the staff necessary. The real costs of a staff will be up to 50% higher than the salary of the staff.

A good and usable product is getting sold automatically if you present it in shops. There are other products like insurances, mortgages, etc. which are getting offered from brokers. Most of the insurances are offering combined packages, which are offering a discount. If the customer takes out one package of this group the price for the remaining things in the package will rise.

If a company offers a new combined package, then it has to have better conditions for the customer.  In this case the company needs to sell more of these packages to have the same winnings. No one gets money as a gift and the company needs to earn money too. This cannot be done by lowering the price for the customer without lowering the cost of sales too. The commission for the sales people will decrease for maximizing the profit of the company and their shareholders. Such a procedure results in a downward spiral in price and performance.

The costs for hiring offshore telemarketing centers are around at a quarter of the onshore prices. Mostly are their products simple not sellable or even the winnings not big enough for paying per hour. For this the most companies found here are offering only pay per sale.

This behavior is very short-sighted, because local people are losing their jobs. People, which have lost their job, have less or no money available. These peoples need to reduce their expenses too for having enough to survive until they find a new job. For this the companies are losing potential buyers. This is leading to the next downward spiral, where the products need to get cheaper and cheaper to get new customers. As nobody can offer the same performance for less money, the performance gets reduced too until the product is getting useless.

Such products shall get sold by using offshore call centers. In the most of the cases the companies are too greedy for supplying data (phone numbers and names) for the call center. The call center should even take the risk about the data. As the most serious data provider in the high wage country are selling data only locally, the international traded data are already heavily used and for this reason more or less useless. Nobody can perform with such kind of data.

The result is: SUCH COMPANIES ARE TO GREEDY AND DESTROY WITH THEIR GREEDINESS THEIR OWN BUSINESS!

You can use the following translation for the offers found here at LinkedIn or Facebook:

• Pay per Sale
  The provider does not believe that his products can get sold or The provider does not believe that the call center can sell the products
  Why in this case he likes to go offshore?
  The reason is mostly that it is the last try before running into bankruptcy
  
  
• High commission rate
  As higher the offered commission is as harder is it to sell the product.
  As higher the offered commission is as more useless is the product
  As higher the offered commission is as more financial problems the company has
  
  
• No data provided
  The call center shall even take the risk and invest into the data for selling the product.
  The company has not enough funds already to invest into good data
  
  
• Upfront payment, security deposit, etc.
  The company has not enough funds to pay the broker or to survive with out the payment of the "rich" call center owner. It is already too much what they are offering for this service.

Today Abdul Rab Rawani asked me at LinkedIn: "Can you suggest me some how should i proceed with outsourcing my processes?"

Someone, which likes to offer or sell something over the Internet need to build up trust. In such a case where it shall come to a business relationship the parties need to trust each other. For this purpose both parties need to show that they are trustful. This cannot be done, if one or both are hiding themselves in anonymity. 

For this my answer has been:

Hi Abdul 

You are in a better condition, because a lot of centers are searching for work and don't find a real one. 

The best way for finding a real center: 

• Describe your project a good as possible 
• Describe the kind of product 
• Describe the time frame of the work 
• Describe the center size you need 
• Describe what you provide (data, training, script,etc) 
• Describe the payment for the center (per hour, per sale, a combination of both, weekly payment, monthly payment, etc.) and if you have experience already in selling the product over the phone the average selling per agent 
• Show that you are a true person. Don't hide yourself in the anonymity of the internet, because you need to build up trust. The same is valid for centers too. Don't give the work to centers, which are hiding themselves. You need to have trust in the work of the center too. 
• Don't make a long time contract. Listen to the provided recordings. Tell to the center where you think that they made something wrong, that they are able to change it. 

I hope that I have nothing forgotten. 

Best regards 

Rudolf 

I know it is hard to bring quality if the broker or the customer thinks that everything is free and they need only pay for sales and not for the work, which is behind the sale and are even thinking that you need to take all the risk. The highest risk is their own product, which they are not able to sell by using a normal way like in a shop. Reject such offers like I have described it in “A LinkedIn offer where the broker likes to reinvent the slavery - David Goodstein”. The result of taking such an offer will be that you are destroying your own reputation. 

A good sale needs time. You are expecting a good quality work from your agents. Why are you making it hard for your agents by using such dialer where the called person hears a prerecorded message while you are connecting to your agents? 

If the caller gets it, that he is listening to a tape, he knows already that you nothing else than a Call Center. The sound of a recording is different than the greeting of from the agent even if the recording is from the same agent, which shall pick up the phone. That is not a technical issue it is depending from the stress and mood of the agent, which changes the sound of his voice during the shift. 

Use another system than such a dialer like described before. Your agents are not robots. Let the agent decide his own workflow and working speed. This will reduce the amount of called people over the phone per hour, but will increase the sales rate. Use a system like “Click to Dial” or “Code to Dial”. This can be simple done by your internal website with a button like “next caller” or by dial a code at the phone. In such a case the phone of the agent rings first and the VoIP System will dial the next caller in the list. Sure the agent need to wait until you reach someone, but the agent is already in the line and the called one does not hear a prerecorded message.

Let your customer provide the data of the people which you should call. Your customer knows better the target group of his product. For this he can make a better selection by using an address broker. Good address brokers in the US are trading their addresses only if you are using an IP-address from the US or you have a postal address in the US. The data, which get traded here from one center to other centers, are useless, because they got already used too many times. Good data are expensive, but your customer likes to sell his product. If your future customer does not like to provide data, than he is too greedy in any case and his product is from a very low value too. Such products don’t get sold good. In such a case you should take only the contract if he is paying per agent, hour, phone minutes, data and the necessary clean up against the “Do not call list”.

Make your own fair contracts and conditions for which you are working. These contracts, which I have seen until now from the brokers and customers don’t have even the value of the paper on which they will get printed. You have only duties and no rights in these contracts, which I have seen until now. They are only for ripping you off. If one point of your contract does not fit for your customer, than this point can get negotiated, but don’t let get yourself ripped off.

David Goodstein is searching for a call center at LinkedIn, where he can pull money, the call center has the risk and the work. The difference to the other scams is only, that the offer is very well described including the cheat (I have only picked out the most important parts):

• "The only thing the customer is responsible for is the monthly monitoring fee. The fee ranges in price between $39 and $60 a month"
  Sorry, who likes the monitoring? In a normal world is it this one, who asks for the monitoring need to pay for it. In this case is it the client, for whom is done the work!
  
  
• "You are responsible for your VOIP minutes"
  Your client is not able to pay the phone bill for the calls to the United States, which are normally traded at www.voicetrading.com for US$ 0.0052 and at www.voicebuy.com between US$ 0.0045 and US$ 0.0075 per minute. This is already too expensive for his customer. How would his customer pay the bill in this case for the call center?
  Sorry Mr. Goodstein, but you like to have a gift? Which gift gets the call center? At this world is nothing for free.
  
  
• "Initially (first 2 weeks) your commission is based off of completed installations only and not on a transfer basis (payout is $150 per installation)."
  Mr. Goodstein, do you really think that someone can survive with $150 for 2 weeks even in a low wage country? Do you really think that you can get someone, which takes the risk of your business for you? I think that nobody will be so stupid and accept such an offer.
  
  
• "We require you to use our Non - Voice Avatar like technology."
  Wow Mr. Goodstein, you like to make a test drive with your Avatar? In such a case you have to pay the agents per hour and not per lead! How the agent will be able to handle difficult and angry people? Mr. Goodstein do you have even recordings for this kind of people? How long is your list of recordings? Should the agent listen to the customer or permanently search for the correct recordings in the list?
  
  
• "After the 2 week trial basis, if we see your team is capable of sending quality transfers on a consistent basis, we will pay you $6 per transfer, with a 60 second buffer)"
  We have seen already that you are not searching for quality. But even $6 is too less, if you accept only 59% of the transfer, like you have sent it in the Excel file, which is attached here. In this case the $6 is only $3.54. Mr. Goodstein, we all know that the US south states lost the war for the slavery. Do you like to reinvent the slavery again?

In the night I got a LinkedIn message from Kaushik Ganguly, Business Advisor and Management Consultant for ITES - Call Center industry with 16 years experience A part of this email is:

"what if center fails to perform? what if center fails to retain campaign? what if center do not work seriously? what if center do not have financial strength to run center? what if center close down for other reasons? AND most importantly ... what if center choose not to pay consultant/broker after getting payment from client?? Those all happened in real life with many people

If center talks about giving monthly payment to consultant ... why they can't pay the way they pay to Chartered Accountant, VOIP provider, Dialer company, Lead provider and many others? Why always they make a big issue of paying to consultant ... when they know getting a good profitable campaign is 500% more important then getting audit, voip, dialer or leads!! "

It seems that this "Business Advisor" does not know for whom he is working and who is paying the bill! He did not learn in "16 years" of experience how business is done. That is the same way like you pay for an attorney to bring you into jail.

If he get's paid from the outsourcing company, then he is in need to verify the center to which he suggest to outsource. This cannot only be done by verifying the business register and the credit-worthiness of the center. That has nothing to do with any upfront fee or any other similar fee, however it would get called. As soon as he takes from the chosen center some money he is running into a conflict of his and his customers interest.

If he get's paid from the center, which takes the outsourcing contract, then he is responsible for the credit-worthiness of the outsourcing company and that this company is a real company. Here he has to do the same inspections and researches about the outsourcing company.

If his client, there is no difference if his client is the outsourcing company or the center which is doing the outsourced work, is a fake, he is in a very bad situation, because he is liable to his client and has to compensate his clients damage, because it his fault if he did his research not in full. In this case the "broker" or however he likes to get called, has to show his identity too. Hiding themselves in the anonymity of the internet show only that the is not real and nobody shall do any business with him. Everybody should know that you cannot reach into pocket of a naked one.

What he has written is true, but the word "center" need to get replaced with the phrase "all participating parties".

In any case his explanations are showing only that he is promoting not existing services or campaigns to get new centers, because he stated in his email that he is starting his work for a center not before he gets the order. This is called betraying and is a criminal action, which will get prosecuted.

Even his company iNanoSoft Outsourcing has no domain. The only result found in Googles history is iNanoSoft.de. It has be a software company from Germany, which is already closed.

The LinkedIn Mail communication: